Chris Ball: Hiring migrant workers to plug skills gaps is 'lazy'

Companies with skills shortages should be encouraged to hire older people who
have been made redundant but still have years of experience and technical
skills to give, rather than plug gaps with migrant workers, according to
equality expert Chris Ball.

UK employers are so often tempted to hire migrant workers to plug skills gaps but there is a more sustainable solution staring them in the face: the tens of thousands of older workers who have been made redundant., says Chris Ball.Photo: Alamy

We hear time and time again about the UK's chronic skills shortages, which is threatening to hold back economic growth. In part, the mismatch between availablejobsand skills has been going on for ages.

The latest warning, delivered in astudy by Hays and Oxford Economicslast week, should be heeded because wage inflation is just one of the unfortunate by-products of skills scarcity.

Skills scarcities are accelerating in some industries while in others we are burdened with a superabundance of people trained in skills we really don't need.

The fact is that many employers have been doing the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns. They certainly haven't been taking on apprentices in a great blast of energy.

As we now know, following the report of the BIS Committeea couple of weeks ago, the 271pc increase in apprenticeships in 2011 from the previous year has been achieved at the cost of quality of training.

We can train as many hairdressers and people for the leisure industry as we like but they won't be able to fill the chronic shortages we have for technicians to do the crucial but sometimes dirty and demanding jobs in manufacturing and processing.

The fact is that many young people would prefer a career in what they think of as "glamorous jobs" compared with a job which entails tough or dirty work, even if the latter is well-paid and offers prospects over the long term. Companies all over the world are experiencing the same problem.

He has a point but UK employers are so often tempted down this lazy road when another more sustainable solution is staring them in the face.

Why is it that German employers have been so carefully pouring over the root causes of skills gaps and attempting to remedy them, while British employers just want to add more migrant workers to the already increasing numbers of people in our crowded island?

Skilled migrants who are helping our economy in many areas are more than welcome, but consider the systematic waste of human beings when older people are made redundant and not encouraged or retrained into other jobs but instead expected to retire – often on a poor pension.

Take a taxi journey from any of our industrial city centres and you are likely to find your driver has had a long career in a skilled job but is now being wasted in a non-skilled role because no one had the wit to retrain him or her. Compare this with a country like Denmark, where if you are made redundant you can expect to end up being retrained for a job that you know employers will need you for.

In most cases, it is not as though we have to start training people all over again because so many skills are transferable. Here in the UK we waste our talented people by heartlessly discarding them when we consider them to be redundant.

He or she may be a skilled aeronautical engineer or technician facing the shock of a business closure. You would think such a person would be snapped up and retrained if necessary but as likely as not this professional will end up in the service sector doing a job that demands little of the skills and know-how built up over the years.

The Government is rightly investing time and energy into youth training but at the same time, despite all the crowing about the burgeoning older workforce, 23pc of men and 37pc of women in the 50 to 64 age category are "economically inactive", often meaning that they are retired early.

Companies like Deutsche Bahn, the German logistics firm, have opened training programmes to train older, unemployed people to become railway technicians to fill their skills gaps. The training is quicker because they are not starting with raw, green recruits. The outcome, according to the company, is brilliantly successful.

This has to be a better way.

Chris Ball is chief executive of TAEN – The Age and Employment Network, a network organisation that promotes an effective job market that serves the needs of people in mid and later life.